29 December 2011

The Communist University publishes in multiple media, but the only register of
"students" is the Communist University Google Group, and some other
Google Groups.

Taken together with the YCLSA
Discussion Forum the CU channel has about 4000 (four thousand) subscribers.
Parallel channels contain another approximately 2000 subscribers, for a grand
total of more than six thousand, all together.

There are no fees, and there is no certification. We will return to the
question of certification, below. First let me give you some more information.

The year-end break is a time of
completing preparations for the next year, and preparations for the CU in 2012
are well advanced. There will be a fuller announcement in early January. In the
mean time, here are some details.

We will us take it in parts. This is because the Communist University is multi-media,
and because it is necessarily to some extent different in each different medium.

E-mail

We start with the Google e-mail discussion groups. The 12 (twelve) Communist
University courses are serialised in 40 instalments via these groups, between
January and November each year. That is four ten-week courses, delivered via
three parallel channels. The whole 2012 schedule looks like this:

SADTU Political Education

Communist University

CU Africa

African Revolutionary Writers

Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1

Development, Rural and Urban

Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace

Karl Marx’s Capital, Vols. 2 and 3

National Democratic Revolution

Hegel, Dialectics, Right and Logic

The Classics

State & Revolution

Basics

No Woman, No Revolution

Philosophy and Religion

For each of the three e-mail channels, there is a corresponding blog, where the
serialised course material is archived each time it goes out. The blogs also
carry information and links that amount to permanent access to all of the
course material, to the above schedule, and to suggested dates for your
study-circle live sessions.

Live sessions

Among other things, the CU
functions as a systematic server of political education material to people's
self-organised study circles around South Africa, Africa and the world.

The schedule of posting and
meeting dates is designed to facilitate the synchronisation of the e-mailings,
such that the material can be printed in hard copy and distributed in good time
for the subsequent scheduled meeting dates. The several hundred reading
texts of original revolutionary literature are formatted for printing as
booklets (A4 folded to A5). The reading texts are attached to the e-mails, and
are also constantly available as downloadable files.

Principles of learning for political purposes

In all cases, the CU believes that for politically-useful learning to take
place, there must be dialogue, and not monologue. Hence the
"many-to-many" e-mail discussions, and hence also the nature of our
live sessions, which are seminars, and not lectures. In our pedagogical
practice we follow the teachings of the late Paulo Freire.

Hard copy

Work has been under way for many months towards a re-launch of the (now) twelve
Communist University courses as Print-On-Demand course packs of booklets,
packaged in a specially-designed and convenient way. The full design was
realised in hard copy only yesterday, for the first time.

These packs should be available
for political schools all over the country via a well-known chain of print-shop
franchises. At the same time, the newly re-formatted text files will be made
available on the Internet, and may also be circulated in a CD format.

The above are the main CU media at present. There can be more. For example, if
people wish to carry the CU into other media like Facebook, or talk-show radio,
or any other, they are welcome to do so, provided that the two-way dialogical
character is maintained as far as possible in each medium.

Let us now proceed to the question of

Certification

Certification is a major operation that involves the creation of a permanent
bureaucracy of reliable record-keeping, and a stable formalisation of the
courses.

The formalisation of the courses is well under way in terms of the defining of
the 12 Communist University generic courses listed in the table above. But
there is no external validating authority that will sanctify the CU's efforts
in this regard.

There are no resources and there is no legal entity that can hold resources as
Communist University. There is no organised collective behind the CU other than
the group (study circle) that meets in Johannesburg, currently at the Vincent
Mabuyakhulu Conference Centre, on Wednesday evenings during the CU season.

One way forward might be to award peer-group recognition. This would be given,
in the first place, to those who have mastered the principles and the practice
of critical pedagogy (the Freirean "praxis"). It would be some kind
of certificate that could be signed by all the available peers. In Freirean
education, the teachers are learners and the learners are teachers, so it would
be appropriate to that extent. Peer recognition is the historically oldest form
of "degree", by the way.

We should note here that there is a contradiction between open-ended Freirean
education, and "qualification". Freire would criticise the latter as
being part of the "banking" theory of education that he opposed.

Further discussion

As always, we must go to discussion, if all of the above is to be internalised,
and equally importantly, socialised.

Please ask more questions and please, all CU subscribers, do give your
contributions on the question of certification.

11 November 2011

Bourgeois propaganda would have everyone believe that
communism is an impossible utopia, and that class relations as we know them now
are all-pervasive in human society, to the exclusion of every other kind of
social behaviour.

But, on the contrary, the development of class relations and
the State (which as Lenin says, is not only the inevitable product of such
relations, but also the proof of their irreconcilability) did not expunge all
previous forms of human relation.

Humans already had language, and language is a powerful,
stateless system. It has no fixed centre.

There are many other examples of communistic human relations
which have survived, like language, and remain as the bulk of our social
fabric. There are even apparently new kinds of communistic social structures
appearing, such as the Internet.

What Andy Blunden has done in the writing that we have
sampled for the sake of illuminating the questions raised in particular by
Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”, is to begin to theorise the communistic
patterns of social activity, mediated by artefacts, that characterise human
social existence in general.

This is the on-going body of humanity upon the back of which
the class struggle is carried, for the time being, like the cross of Christ.

Andy Blunden’s book (from which these excerpts, downloadable
via the link below, are taken) is called “A Critique of Activity Theory”. It is
concerned in part with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, or “CHAT”, but we
can pass over the specifics of “CHAT”, and look at what Andy means by
“collaborative projects” in these chapters.

Collaborative
Projects and Artefacts

Collaborative Projects are how people do stuff. Even
capitalist companies are collaborative projects.

One characteristic that Andy Blunden identifies is that
collaborative projects are always mediated by an artefact, or artefacts. Artefacts
are things made by people (but words are also artefacts, by the way).

What Andy therefore begins to theorise is the social place
of things, or goods, made by people. This is different from the understanding
of such goods as being commodities, which is all that capitalism can manage to
see them as.

Another insight of Andy’s is the way that collective agency
is both expressed, and also formed, within collaborative projects. We may say
that we are humanists, believing in the rational free will of social beings.
But how does this actually proceed? Andy provides a description, rooted in
politics, philosophy and educational theory.

Our own method, following Paulo Freire, is to have dialogue involving
two or more people, centred on a “codification’, which is an artefact (text or
image), conforms to the structure of a “Collaborative Project”.

But the aim within this course on Hegel is not necessarily to
follow Andy into educational theory. The aim within this particular course is
to consider what may already exist under the shell of the class-divided
bourgeois State, so that what will remain if and when that State withers away
can be apparent to us now, today.

What is the living communism of today? This is the question
that is being answered, intentionally or otherwise, by Andy Blunden’s writings sampled
here.

10 November 2011

This is the last part, and the second last item, in our
series on Hegel’s Logic. It is the late SACP stalwart Ron Press’s article “New Tools for Marxists” (see
the download linked below) on the application of Chaos Theory to revolution, written
in the heat of the post-1994 election moment.

History has not actually ended. Closure is not appropriate. Hegel’s
theories have served us well and will continue to serve. There are not two
branches of philosophy. We live in a Hegelian world, no matter what the
reactionaries and the post-modernists may wish to think. The unity of human
history is a hegemonic idea. Science is well established and universally
revered, if not always for the right reasons.

If, because of the collapse of the Soviet Union a generation
ago, we are forced to conclude that the Bolsheviks failed in their revolution
three generations earlier, then it is more than likely that the reason they
failed was lack of philosophy.

Philosophy and the
withering away of the State

The revolutionaries must have a clear philosophical theory
of how the coming classless society is going to work without a state.

In “New Tools for Marxists”, Ron Press wrote:

‘“…the standard
Marxist idea that society passes in a linear manner from primitive communism
via class struggle to the ultimate victory when the working class replaces
capitalism with a classless society is an
unattainable myth. Especially when a classless society was taken to mean
the establishment of order and stability, in fact stasis. The theories outlined above indicate that stasis means the inevitable sudden
crossover into chaos and collapse.

‘Lenin in State and
Revolution continued the work of Engels and Marx in outlining the parameters
which form the basis for the definition of systems indicated by points (a) and
(b). It is interesting that they did not define the form or structure which
socialism will have. Lenin recognised these new structures when they emerged.
He initiated the slogan “all power to the soviets”.’

Ron Press is saying that the theory of the State, and of the
“withering away” of the State, in Marx, Engels and Lenin is not wrong, yet
these three did not have the full theoretical means to appreciate in full how
“stateless” systems can, and already do, work in nature and in human society.

The revolutionaries of today need a Hegel for today: a Hegel
up-to-date.

Let’s finish with two short quotes from our late comrade Ron
Press:

“In the Soviet Union
the “Soviet” i.e. committee system was destroyed by restricting the bandwidth
of communication, and making one node all powerful.”

“But if there is a
lesson to be drawn from the study of complexity it is that a complex system
given a very “simple” goal (in our case the well being of humankind) develops
its own best methods of operation and organisation. Solutions emerge from the
system itself.”

4 November 2011

Lenin’s 1908 “Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism” is a full-length book, but a difficult one to
include under any particular category. It is a polemic against Ernst
Mach and his Russian followers, whom Lenin said had little to
distinguish themselves from the 18th-century subjective idealist Bishop Berkeley. This controversy
does not seem so important today as it was then.

The latter pamphlet is made out of excerpts from Engel’s “Anti-Dühring”, while the “Theses
on Feuerbach” are part of “The German Ideology”,
a book written between 1845 and 1847 by Marx and Engels and then abandoned “to
the gnawing criticism of the mice”.

Karl Marx had a Doctorate in Philosophy but he did not write
a book of philosophy as such, except insofar as his long “Capital” project
could be taken as philosophy, and there are indeed some philosophical
statements here and there among the preparatory works and in the three originally-published
volumes of “Capital”.

So, what is linked from this post comprises the major part
of the philosophical work of Marx, Engels and Lenin. It is a tiny amount when compared
to the world’s literature on philosophy.

It is therefore clear that the classical literature does not
provide us with a full, exclusively Marxist exposition of philosophy. Perhaps this
is fitting, because Marxism is after all not outside of the main stream of
learning. As we have seen, it is a continuation of, as well as a reaction to,
Hegel’s work, while Hegel’s work stands in a similar relation to Kant’s, and so
on.

Taken together, all this means that for the philosophy that
is necessary for revolution, the revolutionaries will have to go beyond Marx
and Engels, and study the full discipline of philosophy, its history, its
development and its meaning. This is exactly what Lenin began to do in the
early 1900s.

In “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” Lenin quotes Hegel
several times in passing, and briefly, though not in this particular chapter. It
would seem that Lenin’s interest in Hegel really only got going later, at about
the time (1914) when he prepared his ‘Conspectus
of Hegel’s book “The Science of Logic”’. The Lenin Philosophy Archive
on MIA is here.

Lenin is saying in this short chapter that that the test of
truth is practice, and this provides us with a continuity in relation to our
previous instalment, from Ilyenkov.

The next part will be the last in this Hegel series.

Picture:
Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”. Picasso
was the most distinguished painter of the 20th Century, and a
communist. His famous mural depicting the fascist aerial bombing of the Spanish
village of Guernica is now at the United Nations.

3 November 2011

There is no a priori humanity,
or presupposition of humanity. There may be a God, or not. What is human is not
given, but made, by humans. We are made as humans by the knowledge that we
continue to get and to share, socially.

The knowledge that humanity has accumulated, altogether, is
science. Objective things-in-themselves that are parts of the universe become
known through labour and are thereby brought into that sphere which is
humanity. So, the Object becomes part
of the Subject.

Similarly, thoughts and decisions become facts of a social
and political kind and become objects of science, including Scientific
Socialism. In this way, Subject
becomes Object.

These reversals, inversions (or “reciprocal actions” as
Clausewitz might have called them), are critical transformations and are
noticed and incorporated into the philosophy of Hegel and of Karl Marx.

We cannot say that everything is thought, and we equally
cannot say that everything is matter; and to say that reality is an unqualified
mixture of thought and matter is only to enter a hall of mirrors.

Hegel creates an escape from this maze into a better, and
dynamic, form of understanding.

Hegel’s solution is to demonstrate how the movement takes
place, not once and for all, but constantly. In the previous part of this
course, Andy Blunden’s lecture explained it like this:

“The categories of
Being which come into being and pass away, continue to come and go indefinitely. The succession of
oppositions which overtake one another in Essence continue to generate polar
opposite pairs of determinations. As these unfold, a new form of social
practice develops self-consciousness, with a succession of new qualities, new
entities, new relations, both incidental and necessary, registered in thoughts
and purposive activity and representations, and judged and people may draw from
these experiences a more concrete understanding of the new social practice as it
develops. So in terms of time, all these relations are happening at the same
time, although there is a logical dependence of the later categories on the
former.”

This movement is an ascent
from the abstract to the concrete.

What is “concrete”? It is the unity and interaction of the
parts of a system. It is a dialectical unity-and-struggle-of-opposites. In
philosophy, “concrete” has nothing to do with being hard or permanent. In
philosophy this word has a special meaning.

“As we know Hegel was
the first to understand the development of knowledge as a historical process
subject to laws that do not depend on men’s will and consciousness. He
discovered the law of ascent from the abstract to the concrete as the law
governing the entire course of development of knowledge.”

“In reality, the
immediate basis of the development of thought is not nature as such but
precisely the transformation of nature by social man, that is, practice.”

Picture:
Pablo Picasso’s “Three Women”. “Cubism” in visual art was a conscious attempt
to represent the relationship of the abstract and the concrete on a
two-dimensional surface.

27 October 2011

Our course on Hegel is in ten parts. It is not exhaustive.
It is designed, like all the Communist University Courses, to stimulate
dialogue, in the belief that the kind of learning that we seek is the social
and political kind of learning that happens in groups. This part will contain
only one item, which is the eighth of Andy Blunden’s ten 2007 lectures on
Hegel's Logic. It contains several quotations from Hegel, and there will be
more in this post, below. We are not abandoning the main CU principle of
relying on original writing and (as a rule) avoiding secondary commentators.

Hegel is indispensible because, among other things:

Without knowledge of the
historical Hegel and Hegelianism, it appears as if Marx and Engels came
from nowhere, whereas the history of ideas is continuous, and dialectical

Without knowledge of
Hegel’s way of thinking, and in particular his Logic, some of Marx, especially parts of Capital, appears
obscure, incomprehensible or even weak and “illogical”

Modern philosophy all descends
from Hegel or from reactions to Hegel; it is incomprehensible without
Hegel (i.e. not just Marx, but all of Hegel’s successors)

The revolutionary battle
must be won in philosophy as much as anywhere else, if not more so

Hegel’s is the philosophy
that we need for our revolutionary practice

Hegel is difficult for us because:

His work appears at first
sight to be voluminous, self-contradictory and obscure

The body of scholars that
maintain Hegel’s position in public thought is too small, and conflicted

Hegel offers a real
transformation, which is in itself a difficult thing to accept and to
internalise

The last line of Andy Blunden’s lecture Subject, Object and Idea (download linked below) contains the
following:

“No-one else has
produced anything that can rival [Hegel’s] Logic; and he left no room
for imitators.”

And the first line of his second-last section of this
lecture, “Hegel’s critique of the
individual/society dichotomy” Andy Blunden writes:

“So what we have seen
is that Hegel presented a critique of all aspects of social life by an
exposition of the logic of formations of consciousness, which does not take the
individual person as its unit of analysis but rather a concept. A concept is understood, not as some extramundane
entity but a practical relation among
people mediated by ‘thought objects’, i.e., artefacts.”

Quite so. Hegel presented a critique of social life. All of Hegel’s “Beings”, “Essences”,
“Notions” et cetera, all the way up
to and including “The Idea” and “The Spirit”, are ways of understanding people
as social creatures (or “political
animals” as Aristotle called them).

This is from the “Shorter Logic”:

“The Idea is truth in
itself and for itself - the absolute unity of the notion and objectivity. Its
‘ideal’ content is nothing but the notion in its detailed terms: its ‘real’
content is only the exhibition which the notion gives itself in the form of
external existence, while yet, by enclosing this shape in its ideality, it
keeps it in its power, and so keeps itself in it. The Idea is the Truth: for
Truth is the correspondence of objectivity with the notion - not of course the
correspondence of external things with my conceptions, for these are only
correct conceptions held by me, the individual person. In the idea we have
nothing to do with the individual, nor with figurate conceptions, nor with
external things. And yet, again, everything actual, in so far as it is true, is
the Idea, and has its truth by and in virtue of the Idea alone. Every
individual being is some one aspect of the Idea: for which, therefore, yet
other actualities are needed, which in their turn appear to have a
self-subsistence of their own. It is only in them altogether and in their
relation that the notion is realised.

“The individual by
itself does not correspond to its notion. It is this limitation of its
existence which constitutes the finitude and the ruin of the individual.”
(Shorter Logic, §213)

Not only does Hegel produce a thorough working-out of the
relation of the individual to society, but he also unifies the Subject-Object
dichotomy with the rest of the social logic. Without Hegel such unification would
be impossible, and we would be left with nothing but nonsense like this cartoon:

To conclude this opening to the discussion, let us return to
something we have quoted before. It is from an afterword of Karl Marx’s
concerning the very work “Capital” that Lenin says cannot be understood without
Hegel’s “Logic”:

“My dialectic method
is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel,
the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which,
under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject,
is the demiurgos of the real world,
and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With
me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world
reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

“The mystifying side
of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago [but although] I openly avowed myself the pupil of that
mighty thinker… with him [dialectic] is standing on its head. It must be
turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within
the mystical shell.”

The great Marx was arguing against Right Hegelians and
anti-Hegelians at that stage, and in defence of Hegel. Unfortunately this
saying of Marx is sometimes taken to mean that Marx had somehow “refuted”
Hegel, demolished him and sent him into the dustbin of history, whereas the
opposite is the case. Marx “openly avowed
[himself] the pupil of that mighty thinker”, and certainly followed Hegel
in believing that such “refutations” do not happen. In the Marxian as much as
in the Hegelian world, the past is contained in the present, and is not lost.

Marx’s remark could lead to another error. It is clear that
Marx is not saying here that he, Marx, stood Hegel on his head. He says that
Hegel stood dialectic on its head. In fact, as we have seen, Hegel’s method involves
constant reversals and Marx follows Hegel in that respect. So Marx might have
better confined himself to saying that Hegel stood dialectic on its head once too often. We cannot say that all the
reversals must be taken out of Hegel because it is largely in this way of
reversals that Hegel is able to achieve the unprecedented transformations that
he does undoubtedly achieve; and likewise with Marx himself. What we can say is
that sometimes Hegel makes mistakes and offers a reversal that we may reject. But
even then we should not be too hasty. Andy Blunden says:

“We should take
[Hegel] at his word when he says that Spirit is the nature of human beings en
masse. All human communities construct their social environment, both in the
sense of physically constructing the artefacts which they use in the
collaborating together, and in the sense that, in the social world at least,
things are what they are only because they are so construed. The idea of spirit
needs to be taken seriously. It may seem odd to say, as Hegel does, that everything is thought, but it is no
more viable to say that everything is matter, and if you want to use a
dichotomy of thought and matter instead, things get even worse.”

21 October 2011

“The Notion is the principle of freedom, the
power of substance self-realised. It is a systematic whole, in which each of
its constituent functions is the very total which the notion is, and is put as
indissolubly one with it. Thus in its self-identity it has original and
complete determinateness.

“The onward movement of the notion is no longer
either a transition into, or a reflection on something else, but Development.
For in the notion, the elements distinguished are without more ado at the same
time declared to be identical with one another and with the whole, and the
specific character of each is a free being of the whole notion.” (The Shorter Logic, The Notion §160-1)

Lenin in “The State
and Revolution” writes about the true theory ofdevelopment. He
is referring to the dialectical logic of Hegel. This is not the theory of “service
delivery”, or of the “developmental state”. It is the theory of how humans,
taken all together, became what they now are, and how they continue to develop
as humanity as a whole, into the future.

What are we getting
from our studies of Hegel? One thing we are getting is a theory of development
that can help us to make sense of “developmental” state, which is otherwise
little more than a “buzz word” in our times.

So, for example, in
the quotation above we may substitute the word “nation” for the word “notion”,
and it makes sense, and is compatible with Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’
statement in the Communist Manifesto that “the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all”.

We have also noted
that Karl Marx used Hegel’s ways and means to work out what became “Capital”, the
most influential book in history.

We have got pointers
or signposts which will help us as we continue to read, study and discuss.

Do we all need to fully
master Hegel at once? No, but as a Party we do need a significant number of the
communists to have mastered Hegel. The knowledge of Hegel needs to be kept
alive by a virtual collective of communist scholars.

The rest of us need
to be constantly moving towards a better understanding of Hegel. We need at
least to have an appreciation of why we have to have some understanding
of Hegel if we are properly to understand Marx; and in this course we have
probably achieved that much, at least, by now. We need to appreciate that for
the Party, Hegel is indispensible, and not a disposable option. That is why
this ten-part course on Hegel is one of the twelve Communist University Generic
Courses and must remain so.

The Subject

The downloadable
study text for this instalment (see below) is Andy Blunden’s seventh lecture,
on The Subject in Hegel’s Logic.

What is “The
Subject”? In philosophy in general, the fundamental question is the
relationship between human Subject and the material Objective universe. Simply
put, life is a dialectical unity-and-struggle-of-opposites between Subject and
Object, where the one cannot exist without the other. Paulo Freire is eloquent
about this, notably at the end of Chapter
One of “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” where he writes, among other
things:

“A revolutionary leadership must accordingly
practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and
people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of
unveiling that reality and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task
of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through
common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent
re-creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for
their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but
committed involvement.”

The first page of
Andy Blunden’s lecture gives depth to this basic understanding of The Subject
and then introduces a Hegelian elaboration of The Subject. This may typify the
difficulty of Hegel: Just when you thought that you had secured yourself to a
firm philosophical rock, Hegel seems to be taking a hammer to it and setting
you adrift again. Please do not fear: nothing is going to be lost.

Nor are we in the
realm of mysteries. On the contrary, what we find is that Hegel is providing
ways to think about quite familiar things, which may not have been in the realm
of philosophy before, like The Judgement of Solomon, the Declaration of
Independence, the Magna Carta, and we can add, the South African Freedom
Charter. Hegel is making a theory of how these determined movements forward
can and do, in Hegel’s words, “emerge out
of the throng of disputation”.

Hegelian philosophy,
as obscure as it may seem, turns out to be the only philosophy that can
help us with the actual political life we lead.

Almost at the end of
this lecture Andy Blunden says:

“…the notions,
judgments and syllogisms of the section on Subjectivity, render themselves as
typical of the forms of consciousness encountered within such formal
organisations. Lenin’s insistence in 1901 that to be a member of the Party an
individual had to participate in one of the Party’s branches or activities is
rational in this light.” (Read it! This is one occasion when the
introduction will not suffice without the reading of the actual text.)

Earlier, Andy had written:

“[Hegel’s] Doctrine of
the Notion is made up of Subject, Object and Idea. The Idea is the unity of
Subject and Object, the process in which the objectification or
institutionalization of the Subject continues to drive the development of the
active and living subject. This development of the Subject itself, the inner
development of the subject which continues within and alongside its
objectification, has the form of the movement towards an all-round developed
relation between individual, universal and particular.”

So we can note that there is a connection between Notion,
Subject and Object, and then that the development of the Subject involves the individual, universal and particular,
which three are soon reduced to “I”, “U” and “P”; and all this moves towards an
articulation of socio-political behaviour which is practically useful to the
point of being indispensible.

Syllogisms

Andy Blunden goes into the question of Hegel’s specific “syllogisms”
very carefully, so we can simply recommend that reading. But what is a
“syllogism” as such? And what is different about Hegel’s syllogisms, as
compared to other ones?

One difference is that Hegel’s syllogisms are all made up of
one each of “I”, “U” and “P”; Individual, Universal and Particular. Andy
Blunden shows very well what that means.

But syllogisms in general are also typically like the
“Socrates” syllogism ("All men are
mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.") - a tight,
undoubtedly true series of two premises and a conclusion, where because the premises
are true, therefore the conclusion must also be true.

There are other syllogisms where the conclusion does not
necessarily fully “follow” from the premises. Such a syllogism may appear to be
a “non sequitur” (Latin for “does not
follow”), or at least as a possible “non
sequitur”. Andy Blunden gives several examples of such “deficient”
syllogisms in his lecture.

Are such half-true syllogisms any use? Yes! Hegel has found
a way to make use of them, and this way of Hegel’s works because of the
distinction between Individual, Universal and Particular.

It is a bit like “approximation” in mathematics. When the
student first comes across it, approximation appears to violate and betray everything
that was hitherto taught about truth and certainty. But when approximation is
done scientifically it creates a degree of certainty out of uncertainty that
cannot be got in any other way.

So it is with Hegel’s syllogisms.

We are now getting very close to the precise reference for
Lenin’s remark that: “It is impossible
completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter,
without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.”
It should not be too difficult to find in Marx’s Capital a lot of syllogisms of
the Hegel type, which are only understandable in the Hegel way.

In the
second paragraph of his Preface to the
Philosophy of Right (download linked below) Hegel wrote: “A compendium proper, like a science, has
its subject-matter accurately laid out … its chief task is to arrange the
essential phases of its material.”

This much
can apply to our “Communist
University”, in relation to this course on Hegel, and to the other 11
courses (see above for the full “compendium”).

But Hegel
wants to emphasise where his own compendium becomes the exception to the
general rule, so in the next paragraph he says:

“This treatise differs from the ordinary
compendium mainly in its method of procedure. It must be understood at the
outset that the philosophic way of
advancing from one matter to another, the general speculative method, which is the only kind of scientific proof
available in philosophy, is essentially different from every other… True, the
logical rules, such as those of definition, classification, and inference are
now generally recognised to be inadequate
for speculative science. Perhaps it is nearer the mark to say that the
inadequacy of the rules has been felt rather than recognised, because they have
been counted as mere fetters, and thrown aside to make room for free speech
from the heart, fancy and random intuition… In my Science of Logic I have developed the nature of speculative science in detail.”

And Hegel says that he is now going to apply this new kind
of Logic in his new book on the Philosophy of Right, of which this document is
the Preface.

Is it the Philosophy of Right and Wrong? Or is it the
Philosophy of Rights, as in Human Rights? You be the judge.

When reading Marx’s Capital, we too are apt, like Hegel’s
contemporaries, to “fall back upon the old-fashioned method of inference and formal
reasoning” , i.e.
the pre-Hegel method. Whereas Marx is using the Hegel method, so that if we are
not aware, then we may be seriously baffled by some of what Marx is arguing as
he “advances from one thing to another”.

This is why
we study Hegel in the first place – so as the better to understand Marx.

The linked document of Hegel’s is readable and full of good
things to discuss. Therefore it can stand as a discussion text without more
elaboration.

But one thing that we can say at this moment is that Hegel
is clearly investigating, as a philosopher, how it is that people's minds
become made up about things, both as individuals and as society, and how it is
that minds are later changed again. This is how politics is done. Hegel’s work
is of direct, practical interest to political people.

“The ingenuous mind
adheres with simple conviction to the truth which is publicly acknowledged. On
this foundation it builds its conduct and way of life. In opposition to this
naive view of things rises the supposed difficulty of detecting amidst the
endless differences of opinion anything of universal application.”

In the next instalment of this part we will take one more of
Andy Blunden’s lectures, and in the next part, take the remaining three of
Andy’s lectures, for what is in them that can help us with Marx. In the final
two lectures we will look at other commentaries and relevant texts, including
from Evald Ilyenkov, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Ron Press.

14 October 2011

From Being, through Essence, to Notion. We have been
through this sequence once with Andy Blunden. Now he takes us through it again.
Click on the link below to download two of Andy’s lectures, compiled together.

Did you ever wonder
quite what makes Quantity turn into Quality? Hegel gives a much fuller
explanation of this than Engels did in “Anti-Dühring”. Not that Engels was to
blame. How was he to know that his own brief works would be more familiar to
posterity than those of his master in philosophy, Hegel?

Ontology is a
philosophical word for the way things follow one from another. The illustration
above is a computer person’s visualisation of “ontology”, for the purposes of designing
computers and software.

Hegel undermined the
idea of ontology. Andy Blunden explains how, and why, it can’t just be “one
damned thing after another”.

In the second of Andy’s
two lectures, Andy moves into the “Essence” part, where we are dealing with
dialectics in the Hegel way.

Andy Blunden’s
lectures need little introduction, because they contain enough that is clear
and could be understood and discussed by any study circle.

We must move through
the material. The next time we pass along this road we will recognise many
landmarks that we have noted this time, and next time we will also notice some
more that we did not see this time.

13 October 2011

Andy Blunden’s two
lectures, for which he chose the excerpts from Hegel that are downloadable via
the link below, begin with Being and go via Essence, to Notion,
a journey that we have already taken with him once. Hegel also makes the same
trip twice, once in the Shorter Logic, and another time in the Science of Logic.

So let’s just say
that repetition is no bad thing when it comes to study.

We will return to
Andy’s marvellously illuminating lectures in the second instalment of this part
of our course on Hegel, but let us note for now part of the quote from Hegel’s “Shorter Logic” that Andy gives in the
beginning of the first of these two lectures:

“Most commonly the refutation is taken in a
purely negative sense to mean that the system refuted has ceased to count for
anything, has been set aside and done for. Were it so, the history of
philosophy would be, of all studies, most saddening, displaying, as it does,
the refutation of every system which time has brought forth. Now although it
may be admitted that every philosophy has been refuted, it must be in an equal
degree maintained that no philosophy has been refuted. And that in two ways.
For first, every philosophy that deserves the name always embodies the Idea:
and secondly, every system represents one particular factor or particular stage
in the evolution of the Idea. The refutation of a philosophy, therefore, only
means that its barriers are crossed, and its special principle reduced to a
factor in the completer principle that follows.”

And then at the end
of the two Andy Blunden lectures, he writes: “Development is the struggle of
opposites which do not disappear”.

This is the
unity-and-struggle-of-opposites that we have picked up from Marx and Engels but
which actually comes from their predecessor, Hegel, in exactly the manner that
Hegel describes in the quotation above it.

It is wrong and
doubly wrong to say that Marx and/or Engels refuted and did away with Hegel, as
some have said and many more have assumed was the case. Hegel remains, and will
always remain, “a factor in the completer
principle that follows”.

Now frankly, in the
Communist University, we would always love to find in any book the most
concise, lucid passage, and if possible a single paragraph or sentence, that
gave us the whole content of the book summed up. Through Clausewitz, Marx,
Engels and Lenin we have sought and found the richest and most concentrated
“short texts” to use for the stimulation of our dialogues.

Equally frank is
Hegel, a very careful man, who has warned us from the start that he does not
want us to be doing any such thing with his work.

Be that as it may, the
four excerpts that Andy Blunden picked out on this occasion may be the closest
we come to a short text from Hegel, in his own words, which would go towards fulfilling
Lenin’s insistence that we must “thoroughly
study and understand the whole of Hegel’s Logic.”

There are many cards in the Hegel pack. These four are as near
to being a “full house” as we are likely to find. Not forgetting that our first
business with Hegel is to understand what Marx got from Hegel.

Hegel is not always obscure. The following is clear enough:

“Real works of art are
those where content and form exhibit a thorough identity. The content of the
Iliad, it may be said, is the Trojan war, and especially the wrath of Achilles.
In that we have everything, and yet very little after all; for the Iliad is
made an Iliad by the poetic form, in which that content is moulded.

“The content of Romeo
and Juliet may similarly be said to be the ruin of two lovers through the
discord between their families: but something more is needed to make
Shakespeare's immortal tragedy.”